We continue across the sea of stars, where Gee and Iro watch the seminal 1988-1997 Legend of the Galactic Heroes OVA a few episodes at a time. Keep an eye out for this podcast between main installments of The GLORIO Chat as we work our way through the history books.

A bit late to the party, but… Regarding the character names, actually this is a weird thing. I can’t watch the show on Hidive (I’m region-locked out) so I don’t know how it’s like there, but in the original cassette/LD releases the OVA had little cards popping up every time a character is introduced (and then every so often later on) with the name in katakana and romaji. These were usually pretty crappy transliterations done, I assume, by some poor intern, and that’s where we got some obviously super wrong transliterations like Cazellnu and Minci and whatnot, that the English fansubs followed.

The later DVD release fixed these (and in fact LoGH actually has a character encyclopedia that has the official name transliterations) to the correct Caselnes, Mintz, etc, and if you check the website for DNT it actually uses these transliterations as well. Except, the English translator apparently didn’t bother to check any official sources, and instead went straight to the English language *fannish* sources which of course still had most of the old, messed up transliterations… that’s where we got “Cazellnu” in DNT even as the official website itself uses “Caselnes”.

About Reinhard, and Kircheis and Reinhard, I wonder if you got the same feeling from these two from DNT. I’m just curious because I kept seeing reactions that came across to me as people not really understanding what Kircheis is to Reinhard, and as I watched DNT I don’t think they managed to portrayed this relationship – not “well”, more like, “at all”. I think it’s partly because the voice actors had zero chemistry and had a weird approach to their characters, but also because unlike in the OVA Reinhard in DNT comes across as actually calm and cool and unflappable. In the OVA (and in the source novel as well) it’s obvious that he’s anything but, he’s a very young person who has this constantly boiling anger and frustration and ambition driving him. I do really hope that you really stick around to see where he ends up and how (even if the OVA does commit a frustrating adaptational error at one point with a key character moment).

By the way, about the episode previews, I’d suggest that you treat them very carefully, especially toward the later episodes of the “seasons”. The OVA was made for people already familiar with the story, so the previews can get incredibly spoilery, along the lines of “In the next episode, X dies when Y thing happens!”

Hey thanks for elaborating on LOGH’s kinda weird name translation issues. I admit we’re caught between a rock and a hard place on how to address the characters since we know the translation isn’t quite right but it’s also the one they’re going to keep using so for the sake of consistency we’re kinda forced to just stick with em.

As for Reinhard, we go into it in our next podcast. I’ll just say we definitely like where things are going with him compared to DNT.

And yes after recording, we’ve seen people warning us about the episode previews and we’ll probably try to avoid those from episode 4 of the podcast onward.